Introduction
Digital applications like Google maps have revolutionized the way my students conceptualize and utilize maps. To my students, the “map” with which they are most familiar can instantaneously calculate routes with concise directions and provide a real-time geographic visual of the space in which they are traveling. This technology has, and continues, to grow so accurate that it has nearly eliminated the need for navigation skills. Moreover, my students are coming of age and learning to navigate geographic spaces in which it is almost impossible to get “lost.” Tidy, concise directions to every earthly landmark seem to be at the fingertips of any cell phone user in the age of modern mapping applications.
In many ways, modern maps disguise the human influence and decision-making that reveals itself more clearly in their analog predecessors. Nonetheless, modern and historic maps alike are products of numerous decisions by a person or people with a particular purpose for creating the map. Maps are markers of human history; as such, they are social, political, economic, and cultural objects.
I believe that my students’ concept of a map as an inanimate screen that can give verbal and visual directions has created a gap in their understanding of maps as human-made texts, each with a central idea, a purpose, and techniques for achieving the mapmaker’s purpose. The assumption that maps are objective, indifferent, and wholly accurate is an erroneous and dangerous one, but an understandable conclusion for a digital native who has primarily utilized computerized map software to navigate their surroundings. Similarly, maps, digital or analog, are often viewed as formal and authoritative documents that lend credibility to the claim of an individual or group of individuals; as a result, maps have frequently been used to legitimize decisions that directly affect social, economic, and environmental outcomes for communities.
In this unit, students will learn and apply map analysis skills to critically analyze historic maps that shaped policy, urban development, and homeownership trends in Wilmington, Delaware. Students will identify and historically orient spaces in urban communities to compare how community demographics and homeownership rates have changed or remained constant over the last century, taking into account the housing discrimination and redlining of the 20th century and the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The skills and content knowledge that students acquire while analyzing maps in this short, supplemental unit will serve as a scaffold to the culminating argument essay in the existing, district-mandated curriculum unit in which students answer the unit’s essential question: Has the American Dream of homeownership been a false promise?
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